David Page: He Saw John Brown Hung
David Page was born into slavery in 1841 in Clarksburg, Virginia. At an early age he escaped from his master in Natchez, Mississippi, and fled north to Ohio. In December of 1863 Page enlisted as a Private with the Fifth United States Infantry, an all black regiment that fought for the Union. He was granted an honorable discharge in 1865. From his days as a slave, Page remembered John Brown’s words of freedom to the slaves of Virginia: that if they got to the Ohio River, there was freedom on the north bank, and still more freedom if they made it to Kansas. In 1867, after living in Noble County, Ohio, for two years, David Page traveled to Kansas with the John Oshel family and settled in Olathe.
The 1880 Federal Census lists David as a farmer living near Pine and Walnut Streets on Olathe’s East Side. His wife, Courtney, took in washing and “kept house”. Page later operated a laundry business out of his home. He married twice and raised four children, Grace, John Henry, Maria, and Lora, all of whom attended the all-black Lincoln Grade School. Grace later operated a hotel in Salt Lake City. John served with the Kansas SGT Infantry during World War I. Maria operated a restaurant on Santa Fe Street next to the African Methodist Church in Olathe. Lora lived to be over 100 years old and became a well known and admired citizen of Olathe like her father.
Page recalled national and local events in a 1924 interview with the Johnson County Democrat. He remembered the hanging of John Brown at Charleston, Virginia in 1859. He saw Brown “mount the scaffold and the sheriff spring the trap.” He was a young boy at the time and witnessed the hanging from a “considerable distance.” He recalled seeing the battle between the Merrimac and the Monitor while serving with the Union forces.
David Page died in 1938 at the age of 97. Veterans Records from the National Archives list “chronic nephritis” as the cause of death. He and other family members are buried in the Olathe Memorial Cemetery.
--ALBUM vol. 12, no. 1 (winter 1999)